A washington Post article tries to put the best face on a possible “Gore in ’04!” bid. Ugh. I can already hear the annoying chants. But aside from that, I welcome the old android, in all his inhuman ugliness, back into the presidential political arena. That way, we can all feel even more secure in a Bush win and a second term for the War on Terror.

By the tenor of the WaPo article though, they seem to be saying, “Well, he doesn’t seem to have much of a chance, but we can hope, can’t we?”

Nobody should mistake west Los Angeles for the rest of America, but the long lines outside Brentano’s bookstore here Tuesday night offered a sharp counterpoint to the inside-the-Beltway notion that Al Gore has few friends left in the Democratic Party.

Hundreds of people, some wearing “Reelect Gore in 2004” buttons, showed up to see the former vice president and his wife, Tipper, who were signing copies of their newly published books . Such well-wishers represent the building blocks of Gore’s strategy for a possible 2004 comeback.

OK, so no one should be making the mistake you just did right now, in the same sentence you mentioned not making it.

“Hundreds” of people at a no-doubt widely publicized book-signing does not constitute broad-based support for a presidential run. You could publicize a book signing by Lyndon LaRouche and get a few hundred of his die-hard fans to come out of the woodwork, especially if you held it in Los Angeles. You’d find an unusually high proportion of former (and most likely current) mental patients among them as well, but we’re talking bodies here, not quality of minds.

The thing that’s really irritating in the rhetorical thrust of this article’s opener is the way it suggests that AL Gore has been sold out by the out-of-touch “inside-the-beltway” party elitists, while the honest, genuine folk who are out here in Los Angeles keepin’ it real haven’t thrown away their Gore-Lieberman campaign buttons just yet. In reality, those couple hundred aren’t the rank and file . They’re the die-hards, the kooks, the kind of people that make most people, Dem or Republican, slightly uncomfortable with their fervor and devotion to a man who should’ve lost, did lose, and then made it clear to everyone in the country why it was better that he didn’t become president.

I humbly submit Exhibit A:

“We were here for four hours,” said Mary Stewart, a real estate agent who came to the shopping mall with her husband, Steve, and daughter Laura. “We would wait 14 hours to meet Al Gore. We love him.”

Now, I think it’s pretty clear who would’ve made the better president at this point, but that’s something that reasonable people can still disagree on. But love?

Honestly now, no matter if you’re the most rabidly partisan, attack dog card-carrying member of the Donks, if Al Gore inspires love in you then I suggest you lie down for a minute and think real hard about what it is you’re saying. Even if you hold a favorable political view of the man, saying you “love” him is like saying “God, I just love this corrugated sheet metal! Really, I goddamn love it! .”

Now, there are perfectly good reasons to prefer sheet metal over other materials when you have a certain job to do. It’s cheap, it’s effective, it’s easy to work with, it does what it says it will do (incidentally, these are almost all qualities in which Gore is severely lacking, but what the hell, we’re being hypothetical), so you could say something like “Yup, that sheet metal sure is not-so-bad stuff, I tell ya whut.”

But start to profess your undying devotion to the stuff in the way Mrs. Stewart did, and you’ll get quite a few people lookin’ at you sorta queer-like, and rightly so. Maybe this is just my intense personal dislike for the man showing through, but anyone tells me they “just love” Al Gore, and I try to not make eye-contact or any sudden moves while backing away slowly.

Although a formal decision is still weeks away, the outlines of a Gore 2004 campaign are clear, and they represent a sharp departure from the route he followed in 2000. Not only would Gore try to reinvent himself by being bolder, looser and less programmed …

Oh wonderful. This would make, what, 5673 personal reinventions thus far? Or have we hit 6000 by now? I’ll have to send away to NASA on that one.

Someone should tell Gore, or input it directly into his user-interface, that the problem isn’t that he wasn’t allowed to be “the real Gore” enough. That self-created personal crutch of myth has to be brought down right now. The problem wasn’t him hiding his personality, the problem was his personality, in all its dishonest, arrogant, petulant glory .

All those sounds he made during the debate hat made it seem like he was either constipated or had blown an exhaust valve somewhere… did thse mean old campaign advisors that wouldn’t let Gore be Gore and kept him from “really letting ‘er rip” as Gore whined in a pathetic piece of post-election spin, tell him to act so that the entire nation thought he was a spoiled, bratty teenager who was sure that he was smarter than everyone else?

Gore often complained in 2000 of being encumbered by the trappings of office — the big blue-and-white Air Force Two that carried him from city to city; the long motorcades that tied up traffic and weighed down his movements; the security that often kept him away from ordinary voters. Now, he will get the chance to prove he can do better without them.

Yeah, good luck with that. Lemme know how it works out.

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